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Humanitarian Crowdfunding is an emerging, donation-based crowdfunding vertical recognized by the humanitarian community. It is classified as child category, nested under the generic term "charitable giving".

Although humanitarian crowdfunding is not a regulated vertical like equity crowdfunding, subject to securities and financing regulations, efforts are underway to link humanitarian crowdfunding to professional level humanitarian operations and establish minimum standards for humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns, qualitatively distancing humanitarian crowdfunding from charitable giving and making humanitarian crowdfunding a distinct vertical.

Defining Characteristics
Modern humanitarian action has evolved since the creation of the Red Cross in 1988. Humanitarian aid today is a highly professionalized field. Even at the grassroots level, humanitarian operations are subject to evolving minimum standards and expectations governing operational competency, reporting, transparency and accountability. These standards and expectations are influencing and shaping humanitarian crowdfunding.

Presently, humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns are expected to be initiated by Aid agencies and raise support for activities falling within the scope of humanitarian and development activities classified by OECD DAC-CRS purpose codes and supplementary activity codes established by AidData. Campaigns and activities are also expected to adhere to common principles and universal minimum standards for humanitarian response outlined by the Sphere Project. Humanitarian aid activity information should be published in comparable detail, in a manner visible across the humanitarian community accessible to analytic applications.

Challenges
In practice crowdfunding platforms like Crowdrise, Fundly, Generosity, GoFundMe, GlobalGiving, Indiegogo, StartSomeGood and YouCaring treat humanitarian activities differently. They use inconsistent terms to refer to humanitarian activities and aggregate humanitarian and non-humanitarian activities together, based on how Humanitarian Aid is defined. YouCaring for example loosely lists 21 subcategories under the term "humanitarian causes", including categories like Pets, Tuition, Neighbors and Sports. GIVEasia claims to be "Asia's Leading Humanitarian Crowdfunding Platform" while hosting a similar broad range of appeals.

Platforms use labels out of ignorance and based on perceived appeal and marketability, often highlighting popular causes over other areas. And when labels falling within the scope of humanitarian operations are used they are used in a way excluding other divisions of humanitarian action and the progression of action from emergency to development and gratiations. The practices do little to make the public aware of what humanitarian action is.

Future of Humanitarian Crowdfunding
Humanitarian crowdfunding is seen as an evolving vertical, adapting to humanitarian needs and input provided by humanitarian organizations and being shaped by strains on humanitarian financing produced by acute, large and protracted humanitarian crises and trends towards standardization and open data sharing.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Beehive, a nonprofit, open source initiative improving humanitarian crowdfunding, see Humanitarian Crowdfunding heading toward a distributed-goal framework allowing data sourced from the humanitarian community to inform giving in real-time supporting humanitarian and development aid activities.

Innovation
Linking IATI ( International Aid Transparency Initiative ) and crowdfunding is seen as a way of innovating humanitarian crowdfunding and making data on aid activities, transactions and results visible across different crowdfunding platforms.

Akvo RSR is an online communications, reporting and monitoring hub for humanitarian and development activities that can be searched by organizations needing funding. Akvo RSR provides a means to donate to aid activities reported in compliance with the IATI Standard. IATI information fields make it possible to compare activities and view information about partners, transactions, related activities in granular detail and track results using measurable indicators. The hub is an model next-generation humanitarian crowdfunding application created by humanitarian stackholders, that complies with humanitarian standards and established practices..

Classification Systems and Crowdfunding
Classification schemes define and differentiate humanitarian action from non-humanitarian actions.

NTEE is a classification system used principally to classify non-humanitarian activities whereas DAC-CRS is a classification system maintained by the OECD DAC Secretariat used to classify humanitarian and development activities. OECD DAC-CRS codes are incorporated into International Aid Transparency Initiative's (IATI) open data sharing standard and framework for aid activity reporting, used by hundreds of humanitarian and development organizations, to classify aid activities by sector. Beehive is the first and only humanitarian crowdfunding initiative enabling humanitarian and development organizations to launch crowdfunding campaigns with their IATI activity files, linking aid activity reporting, DAC-CRS codes and crowd-fundraising.